by Eric Nylund
___________
“It’s just cancer.”
“What do you mean, it’s just cancer?”
“I mean, it’s just cancer. A very simple cancer that hasn’t spread or metastasized and is eminently operable.”
“I don’t mean to sound rude, Doctor—”
“I’m not a doctor, I’m a medical technician—”
“Whatever. What I’m saying is that I don’t know what cancer is.”
“Oh. I got you. Cancer’s a kind of um . . . slow-burn, localized infection, kind of. But we haven’t really seen a lot of it since . . . hmm, twenty-second century, according to this. Anyway, it’s easy to treat, but you’re going to have to have surgery.”
“What for? I thought you said it’s an infection. Can’t you just irradiate or drug it?”
“Yes, and we’re going to do both of those. But to be sure we get all of it, and don’t have you back here next month, we may have to remove some tissue.”
“What kind of tissue?”
“Nothing you need for a date. Don’t sweat it.”
What a bastard arse of a morning, he thought to himself. I wake up with a stomachache and end up in the medical bay with an archaic disease that was wiped out by simple gene therapy four hundred years ago. At least, according to Shipnet. There were more than fourteen terabytes of data on “Cancer,” which was apparently damn-near ubiquitous in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
His morning was about to get much worse.
The ship he was in was heading into a grim unknown. The planet Algolis had been attacked by a small but potent Covenant force. Details were thin, since the only witnesses were civilians. Civilians who’d barely made it off that world. Civilians who’d been kept deliberately in the dark about the Prototype weapons systems on that planet and had escaped by the skin of their teeth, and by the sacrifice of a brave few Marines from the Corps of Engineers.
It was a mess. And they were hurtling into it through the quantum foam and spatial uncertainty of a rushed slipspace jump. The plan was to stop short of the system itself and come in under the cover of a gas giant and a faked asteroidal trajectory—an old strategy, but one that worked well enough. Find out what had happened on Algolis and make sure the weapons prototypes were completely eradicated. Then loop back on a complex and slow Cole Protocol return trip.
The last mission had been complicated by a Marine sergeant going MIA. Guy the other Corps of Engineers salts called “Ghost.” He supposed they were all ghosts now. Or ONI was hiding something.
A mess.
“Mo Ye, how come I have cancer?”
Mo Ye, the shipboard AI of the UNSC Destroyer The Heart of Midlothian, thought for a picosecond before answering through the medbay’s directional audio feed. “Nothing in your civilian, Marine, or ODST record to suggests any particular genetic preponderance. But it happens from time to time. Perhaps you’re just a throwback, Baird. It would explain that Cro-Magnon brow of yours.”
Mo Ye’s avatar, a small, angry, and elderly looking Chinese lady in peasant’s garb, flashed a rare smile as she said it and cackled through a crackling (and perfectly synthesized) smoker’s cough to punctuate her joke. Her eyes sparkled with the wicked humor of the viciously old and crotchety. The projector plinth on which she stood pulsed a pleasant pink hue.
Orbital Drop Shock Trooper Sergeant Mike Baird snorted back a laugh. Mo Ye was well known for her bone-dry sense of humor, but he smiled as he thought of his high school nickname: Captain Caveman.
He really did have a heavy brow; a thick ridge that capped an otherwise unremarkable, if sturdy face. A prominent rounded jawline and sharply defined cheeks helped elevate him lightly into the realm of Homo sapiens, but a low-slung, muscular build, a close-cropped dusting of silver-black hair, and cloudy, amber eyes did little to dispel the visual notion of a rock-banging troglodyte.
“Don’t worry about the surgery, Baird. It really is trivial. The autosurgeon will be done in less than an hour. But you’ll be under for significantly longer than that. It’s a straightforward but invasive procedure. I’ll be observing and can retain a vid for you if you want to see the procedure after you wake up.”
Mo Ye spoke in an almost gentle tone, her version of a bedside manner, Baird supposed.
“No thanks,” he said. “I’ll be seeing plenty of blood and guts where we’re going.”
“Let’s hope not,” replied Mo Ye. “Intelligence is rough, but we’re not expecting trouble, just a lot of rubble.”
“When will I be back on duty?” he asked. Baird was starting to worry that this surgery would keep him shipboard. He didn’t want to miss the ride when he and his squad were dropped in hot on Algolis’s night side. Quiet or not, he loved the thrill of the drop and the subsequent sweep. He wanted action.
“Two days, by rule,” she said, “but you’ll be happy and ambulatory in the morning. Now go to sleep.”
Baird heard the pop-hiss of a pneumatic syringe and the gentle beep of his vitals as he lay in the padded autosurgeon cot, even as the narcotic slowed his pulse. He never felt the injection itself. The soft yellow glow of the medbay became a warm, reassuring sepia.
The red-haired medical technician who’d given him the bad news earlier smiled through the yellowing haze and he was lulled by the slowing beat of his own heart. And then there was nothing.
The Heart of Midlothian scythed through slipspace with the silent precision of a scalpel.
TWO
___________
“Wake up.”
In his dream, the voice was of his mother in Scotland, telling him it was time to get up and go to school. It was freezing outside, he knew. A biting, bludgeoning cold that punished schoolchildren before they ever made it to class. An unforgiving, frigid wind that roared in from the gray North Sea and turned little hands into useless pink mittens, unable to type or scratch on datadesks until furious rubbing and cosseting heaters warmed the blood again.
He didn’t want to go to school. He wanted to stay here, wrapped up in these soft blankets.
“Wake up.” Insistent now. But hissed. Not his mother. Not Maud Baird’s pleasant singsong brogue. Nope, this was thick Mandarin-accented En glish.
The sepia glow had gone. The medbay was in near darkness, punctuated by the soft red pulse of the emergency floor lights. A dream. But goddamn if that cold wasn’t real.
“What the f—”
“Ssssh.” The hissed demand seemed to drill into Baird’s ear. He realized it was Mo Ye, using the directional acoustics of the medbay—ostensibly for patient privacy. But he knew, even through the groggy haze of narcotics and sleep, that something was wrong. The lights, for one thing, without even the pink glow of her avatar to show which plinth she stood on.
“What’s happening?” Now he whispered.
“I’ll tell you as you move, but right now if you don’t put on some clothes and do as I say you will be dead in a couple of minutes.” Mo Ye was using a tone he’d never heard before. He started moving.
In less than a minute, he was up, dressed, and fastening his boots. The confusion and torpor of the drugs were still softening the edges of everything. This still didn’t feel real. Mo Ye began to brief him. The news wasn’t good. But it certainly was real.
“They were waiting for us when we dropped out of slip-space,” she whispered.
“Covenant?” he blurted, embarrassed even as he spoke the obvious.
“Yes. A small group. Not a formation we’ve encountered before. At least according to my records. One Cruiser and four completely new ships escorting it. All dark gray, no surface features or lights and no weapons systems that I could discern. What they did have was a bellyful of boarding craft. And our ONI contact group was not there.”
“So we were boarded?”
“Almost as soon as we dropped out of slipspace. Perfect targeting. As if they knew exactly where we were going to exit. Inside the range of our weapons systems before I could react. Punctured the hull in two hundred different locations and sw
armed us before we could sound a general alarm. It was like exiting in the middle of a meteor storm.”
“What about the crew? What about the men?”
“Dead.”
“All of them?!” There was a tremor of outrage, of fear as he raised his voice.
“Ssssh!” she repeated. “They’re still here and I suspect they’re heading here to the medbay for another look.”
This was all happening too fast. “How long was I out?”
“Twenty-three hours. And that’s why you’re still alive.”
“Why didn’t they just destroy the ship? What do they want?” he hissed back, his breath forming a frozen cloud like a literal ellipsis after the question.
“Me,” she said. “And Earth.”
SHE CONTINUED her whispered briefing as he scouted the medbay for warmer clothes. They had operated like shock troops, coursing through the ship—a cataract of plasma fire and Needler shards. Grunts, Jackals, and several Elites, clad in the glittering gray of the enigmatic ships. The Destroyer’s crew never stood a chance. The Marines fell in the face of overwhelming, surprise force. Even the few ODSTs aboard—Baird’s friends and comrades—had died quickly, most before they ever reached a weapon. Almost every sidearm and firearm aboard had been secured in one of the ship’s two armories. It had been a slaughter.
Those who had fought back did so with the sidearms of fallen Masters at Arms and weapons dropped by the Covenant boarding party. Few had died well. And those who lingered, their burning wounds still smoking, had been executed with ruthless efficiency. The Covenant wanted this ship clean and empty.
Baird, she explained, had been spared by his narcotic slumber. The Covenant had gone from deck to deck looking for either movement or simple life signs and terminating those who hid in terror, in dark corners of the ship. One by one.
Baird’s pulse and vitals had apparently slipped below whatever criteria the Covenant sought.
“So what the hell are they doing?”
“They’re trying to extract me from the ship. And then they’re going to try and extract Earth’s location from me. By hook or by crook.”
“What about the Cole Protocol?” he asked. “Aren’t you supposed to destroy the ship, or self-terminate?”
“I can’t self-terminate. I already tried. When they boarded, they brought something new with them. Things they call Engineers. They’re . . . I’m not sure what they are, precisely, but they’re semi-organic. The first thing they did was separate me from the core systems. A splinter of my persona is out here with you, but the bulk of my memories and sheer processing power are locked in Computing on the bridge. I can’t access myself. This fragment of me is just a chunk I chipped off to monitor your surgery and it was severed along with my access to security, engines, navigation—all the useful stuff. I’m not exactly running at full capacity here. This is a seriously smart group. To be honest, my own maker probably couldn’t pull off that trick.”
“Who are these bastards?” he asked, half rhetorically. They were obviously what they appeared to be: a Covenant intelligence and interdiction group. Discreet black ops instead of brute force. Was this new, or just a behavior they’d never observed in Covenant sorties? Were they connected to the discovery of Algolis’s Prototype armory?
“I have no idea who these bastards are,” she said. “But they’ve got us cornered. I can’t access the ship’s security; I’m almost blind. I can’t even display my avatar. I have to assume they’re going to realize both of us are here, sooner or later.”
“Why not blow the ship? Cook the whole goose?” His exasperation was mounting.
“Two reasons,” she said. “First, in my present state of coherence and security clearance, I’m hamstrung by a default safety precaution—Asimov’s First Law of Robotics. I cannot under any circumstances harm or by inaction cause harm to come to a human. When I’m running at full capacity I can ignore that one at will. I used to ignore it all the time, in fact.”
“Bugger,” he said, pretending to know what an Asimov was. “And second?”
“Second,” she said, with an odd hint of chagrin in her voice, “the self-destruct permissions and sequences are locked away with the other half of me. I can’t access them anyway.”
He thought about what this meant for a moment. An encrypted but otherwise unguarded treasure trove of information about humanity, currently being probed and tinkered with by a previously unknown group of tech-savvy, sneaky Covenant.
“Does the Asimov thingy . . .”
“Rule of Robotics.”
“Yes, yes, does the Asimov thingy only count for humans?”
“Of course. I don’t feel terribly responsible for Covenant safety, Baird.”
“So what do you have access to?”
“Some doors,” she said. “And a lot of meds.”
THREE
___________
Holding a fire extinguisher in his hands, now marginally warmer in two layers of sterile surgical gloves, he watched his breath condense as he tried to calm himself. Motes of dust and tiny crystals of frozen liquid danced and sparkled in the chill air. In the red pulse of the emergency lights, it looked like a faint snowstorm of blood. He supposed some of it probably was. He shuddered and closed his mouth.
The oxygen was still good, but most other systems had either died or been killed by the boarding party.
“So we don’t know if anyone is out there?”
“Not until we open the door,” whispered Mo Ye. “It would be prudent to assume your awakened state has shown up on their scans. They were scanning for life signs when they swept the ship.”
“And the plan if there’s nobody out there?”
“You make your way aft, get to the engine room, and manually instigate an attraction coordinate. We’ve been through the procedure. You’ve read it back to me. It will work. You’ll escape in a lifeboat. The ship will spin up and jump into the nearest large mass. That should be the red giant about fourteen million miles starboard. That ought to cook their goose.”
“Aren’t there safety procedures and systems to prevent this kind of shit?”
“There were. Luckily for us the Engineers truncated those along with my systems. It should work.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“I’m only sure of the seconds leading up to my schism. But I am sure that if we don’t try, they are eventually going to crack my encryption and lead the Covenant directly back to Earth, Cole Protocol be damned.”
He hefted the dense bulk of the fire extinguisher. Literally cold comfort.
“Okay, then.” He breathed deeply. Calmed himself. Murmured an internal, calming battle mantra. “Open the bloody door.”
FOUR
___________
It is fair to say that the group of Covenant soldiers standing outside the medbay was far more surprised than Baird was. He was expecting unthinkable trouble. They were expecting to find a wounded, cowering, and almost certainly unarmed medical technician. What they found instead was a highly trained and highly capable 220-pound Orbital Drop Shock Trooper carrying a 20-pound titanium bottle.
He didn’t have time to form a complete picture, but the instinctual snapshot he took as he rolled out of the medbay doorway and right into the small group of aliens was plenty. Four Grunts, two Jackals, and, in the shadows on the far right, a figure so tall and imposing it could only be an Elite.
“Christ.”
He came back up to his feet at withering speed, breaking the first Jackal’s jaw and neck instantly with the extinguisher’s unforgiving mass. Fragments of beak and tooth glittered in the dark. The Jackal simply collapsed, falling backward as the momentum of the cylinder and the human wielding it snapped the life out of him. The Carbine he was holding fell with him.
Baird caught the Carbine even as he dropped his makeshift battering ram. The extinguisher landed on its activation stud and the resulting explosion of halon gas and sound bought him his life, as a Carbine round from the other Jackal, who was
far less panicked than the Grunts, sliced through his Cro-Magnon brow, nicking bone and knocking him backward on top of the fallen Jackal. As he fell, he fumbled, found, and fired the Carbine trigger. Three rounds eviscerated his would-be killer.
The Grunts squealed and scattered. Two of them ran right past him and vanished into the medbay. A third tripped, its plasma pistol clattering across the floor. The fourth wasn’t so lucky. As Baird rose to his knees, then his feet, wheeling, trying to get a bead on the Elite—there was a blur, a flash of light and thunderous impact. His breath was knocked out of him.
The Carbine fell from his hands. He looked down at a strange scene. The fourth Grunt was pressed up against his belly, squirming, staring up at him and wailing. The Grunt was impaled on a fork of blinding light, a Covenant energy sword. The twin tines of superheated, seething energy had passed through the Grunt. And through Baird.
He looked up into the face of the Elite. The massive creature regarded him through cold black eyes. It tilted its head. Baird wondered what the gesture meant. And the Elite yanked the blade from both of them. The Grunt fell dead, Baird, back to his knees, clutching his belly.
Ferocious, burning pain seemed to consume his entire torso. He felt like his innards were boiling. He looked down at his hands, expecting to see blood. There was none. The two holes in his clothes smoldered, the flesh beneath fused and cauterized. Baird fell face forward into blackness.
FIVE
___________
“Wake up.”
His mother again. It was time to go to school. But it wasn’t the same. He wasn’t cold. He was burning. He was on fire.
“Wake up.” Insistent, but worried. Not mother. Mo Ye again.
“I’m dead.”
“You’re not dead. But you’re not in good shape. The blades passed right through you. Scorched a lot of stuff. Missed your spine by a distance I can’t even make myself repeat.”
“I feel like I’m dying.”
“That’s not surprising. You have serious burns. And significant injuries. Internal and external. I’m going to give you some meds, and we’re going to try again.”
“It didn’t work out so good last time.” He coughed and a spasm of pain squeezed him like an invisible fist. “I’m tired. I want to go to sleep.” He realized that he did very badly want to sleep. And part of him knew what that really meant.